Written by

Michael Cass

The Tennessean

The Tennessee Democratic Party “beat every bush” on Music Row and in other entertainment industry centers as it tried in vain to come up with a Volunteer State celebrity to run for U.S. Senate against well-funded incumbent Bob Corker this year, a spokesman said.

But the party passed on an opportunity to tell voters about a candidate with views that ran counter to Democratic doctrine, leaving it vulnerable to embarrassment in a wide-open primary election.

The party’s failure to find a legitimate candidate who represents its values left Democrats picking up the pieces as soon as Mark Clayton won the primary going away on Thursday. The party disavowed Clayton less than 24 hours later, citing his affiliation with Public Advocate of the United States, a pro-traditional marriage, pro-life organization that has been called a hate group.

Gary Gene Davis, who finished a distant second to Clayton in the primary, said Democratic Party officials already knew what Clayton stood for after he ran for Senate in 2008 and pulled in 32,309 votes to finish fourth. Bob Tuke won that primary with 59,050 votes, beating Davis by about 20,000 votes before losing to Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander in the general election.

Davis said party activists in Shelby County told him that Chip Forrester, the state party’s chairman, had openly endorsed actress and environmental activist Park Overall, describing her to them as “our candidate.” He said Forrester should have worked harder to tell voters about Clayton’s beliefs, which, according to his campaign website, include the need to “defend Tennesseans from the North American Union, National ID cards, illegal trade deals like NAFTA, radical homosexual lobbying groups who want to get in the Boy Scouts and terrorists who are hiding in the Army.”

The website does not appear to have been updated recently. It still refers to the 2008 election and Clayton’s disagreements with Alexander.

“If you really believed this was your candidate and you had this information (about Clayton), why didn’t you release it before the primary even started?” Davis said.

Spokesman Brandon Puttbrese said the party was “agnostic” in the primary, although Overall was given a speaking slot at the annual Jackson Day dinner and was the only one of the seven candidates who took the party up on its offer to help with news releases, talking points and social media.

He said it would have made little sense to talk about Clayton, “pretty much a fringe candidate to anybody.”

“You don’t push around someone’s name that you don’t want to get elected,” he said. “We could never have anticipated it would have ended this way.”

Although he declined to identify any targets, Puttbrese said officials tried to recruit any Tennessee resident they could find with enough name recognition to give Corker a battle.

“Tons of calls were made to legitimate politicians and other high-profile Tennesseans,” Puttbrese said Monday. “We beat every bush and left no stone unturned with people who had already made a name for themselves.

Hard to take sides

John Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt, agreed that Democrats were destined to struggle to find a viable foe for Corker, a popular first-term senator. After the qualifying deadline came and went and the primary ballot was set, there wasn’t much to do but watch.

“The party itself has a difficult time taking sides in a primary,” Geer said.

Puttbrese said a party can’t do much to keep a distasteful but duly qualified candidate off the ballot. He cited Basil Marceaux, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who made national headlines in 2010 with his policy positions, including a plan to fine state residents $10 if they didn’t own guns.

A better example might be James Hart, who won the GOP nomination in the 8th Congressional District in 2004. Hart supported eugenics, a movement that believes unfit parents should be prohibited from having children, and said government should play a role in creating a “favored race” through extreme changes in U.S. welfare and immigration policies.

The state Republican Party urged voters to support another candidate before the primary and again before the general election. Then-U.S. Rep. John Tanner easily defeated Hart to win his ninth term.

Puttbrese conceded that there had been some “Monday-morning quarterbacking” after last week’s primary blew up in the party’s face, drawing attention and ridicule from pundits including liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. But he said Democrats weren’t expecting to win the Senate race anyway.

“Hindsight is 20/20,” he said. “But it doesn’t change our electoral plan much. We’ve always been focused on supporting good Democratic candidates for state House and Senate and Congress in what we thought would be viable races.”

The next test of the party’s ability to find candidates could come during its own leadership elections in January. Forrester has been criticized for Democratic electoral losses at the Statehouse and in Congress during his nearly four years at the helm.